


you'll see the dawn again

by Rahmi



Series: A New World Born [1]
Category: Final Fantasy XII
Genre: Clothing, Dungeon, Gen, Head Injury, Healing, Magic-Users, Nudity
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-12
Updated: 2020-04-12
Packaged: 2021-02-23 04:23:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,135
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23605600
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rahmi/pseuds/Rahmi
Summary: Wanderings around Ivalice: The Nalbina Dungeon. Balthier is never setting foot in the territory formerly known as Dalmasca again. Nothing about this night has gone right.
Relationships: Balthier & Fran (Ivalice Alliance), Balthier & Vaan (Ivalice Alliance), Fran & Vaan (Ivalice Alliance)
Series: A New World Born [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/67016
Comments: 10
Kudos: 38





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Mumford and Sons because why not.

The trip to Nalbina is uncomfortable for a myriad of reasons.

First and foremost is the heat. Balthier knows, intimately, that Imperial airships have a judicious cooling system, all the better to keep judges from roasting within their ridiculous armor. Prison transports do not appear to share the same system.

There is sweat rolling down his spine; Fran’s exposed flesh shines with it, even in the dim lighting. The air is rank with their accumulated odor. Not a hint of a breeze stirs in their tiny transport cell.

The cell has clearly only been designed to hold a single occupant, and perhaps not even that, if the prisoner were to be a particularly round seeq. They are all three rather svelte, and yet there is naught he can do to keep from touching his unfortunate cellmates.

He is crushed against Fran, the churl sprawled unconscious across both their laps.

Which is another reason the trip is intolerable.

He’s given his word to a sobbing maid that Vaan would be returned. He did not specify that it would be in one piece, but it had certainly been implied.

“Any news?” he asks.

Fran flicks an ear at him in obvious irritation. “If there were news,” she says, acidly, “I would have shared, if only to quiet your fretting.” Her manacled wrists rest on Vaan’s chest, fingers awkwardly crooked so they touch flesh.

Healing magicks unfurl from her hands, spreading white light against bare skin. Vaan does not stir under the barrage of spell work, eyes ringed in dark bruises, clear fluid smeared across his cheeks.

Balthier has never seen Fran so pale as when the fluid had begun to leak from the churl’s ears and nostrils.  


* * *

Vaan initially had seemed only slightly dazed after the blow to the head. It hadn’t taken him long to regain his feet, though the Imperial officer had felt the need to chivvy him along before finally hooking a cruel hand between the churl’s manacles and tugging fit to bruise.

He had been awake, if moderately more incomprehensible than what Balthier had come to expect, through their forced clothing change. The Imperial Army apparently cared enough for propriety that they all were curtained from each other by only a flimsy wall of fabric.

He had not tried to peep at Fran; Balthier had marked it for its oddity.

All beings that liked the female humanoid body tried to sneak a glance if they thought they could. Especially a teenager who had already gawked once.

It was only when they were being tossed into the small holding area of a transport airship that Vaan had dropped like the proverbial stone. The Imperial officer in charge had simply thrown Vaan in after them and closed the door. Balthier seethed in the dim lighting of the transport cell.

The gods did not smile on them indeed.

“Well,” he said and glanced over to find Fran scowling down at the hume in her lap. Ah. “If you would--”

“Do not speak,” she snapped as her hands grasped at Vaan’s vest to roll him onto his back. “All my attention is required here. I’ve no time to coddle you.”

Balthier closed his mouth, stung. He had only been about to offer to shoulder the churl’s weight; Fran did not generally appreciate the touch of strange humes, even insensible ones.

He left her to her inspection, pointedly turned away from the spectacle she made as she tried, unsuccessfully, to stretch her hands flat to Vaan’s chest. He began an inspection of his own. Escape was unlikely on the transport, but stranger things had happened in his career as a sky pirate.

The bright flare of white magicks dragged his attention back towards Fran and the inconvenient burden in both of their laps.

“Come now,” he said. “‘Tis only a knock on that rather hard skull of his. There’s no need to waste magicks on it.” They’d seen the churl take any number of blows in the short hours they’d known him and he would always rise up readily enough afterwards. A few minutes more and he would probably be on his feet again, pacing and complaining mightily of the Empire.

Fran shot him an absolutely filthy look from beneath her brow and did not deign to answer. Her spell slid through Vaan and did naught to lighten the bruising that had begun to rise about his eyes. Fran herself seemed pleased with the outcome, though she immediately began casting again.

As long as they were being wasteful...

Balthier dropped his bound wrists to the churl’s knees.

He was not inept at the healing magicks. “Shall I?” he asked, and spun the barest beginning of a cure spell down into the boy to find what was vexing Fran so.

It was a shock, the mess the blow to Vaan’s head had left. The bruising to the churl’s face was the least of it. _Here_ was a fracture line, the bone half-pulverized and shifted from where it should be, and _there_ was delicate tissue overwhelmed as it bled into confined spaces, unseen tears in crucial structures oozing things Balthier did not have names for but knew should not be outside of their designated pathways. 

His spell faltered at the sheer damage that an armored elbow had left in its wake.

He stared down at the churl, at the _teenager_ , and feared.

“If I have need of your clumsy healing attempts, I shall advise you,” said Fran. “The mist is thin; do not draw on it.”

* * *

Instead of assisting with magicks, Balthier has found himself in the enviable position of providing stabilization. He is to keep the churl from flopping about when they are jostled by whatever unseen stretch of turbulence their Imperial guards pilot them through.

“Give me your hand,” Fran says.

Balthier obligingly hooks his smallest finger with hers, mindful of her claws, and waits to see what she has in mind. “And why are we holding hands?” he asks.

He feels it a moment later - a deep pull on his energy, a dizzying drain that hooks into the core of him without mercy. Exhaustion spreads in its wake, as though he hadn’t slept in years, as though he had spent more than just a night traipsing through a sewer.

The kind of exhaustion that reminds him of suffocating under heavy armor, under heavy orders.

It’s a struggle to remain calm, but his voice is admirably level when he says, “I believe we spoke about advising me prior to this particular spell?”

“I asked for your hand,” Fran says distractedly. “Did you think me juvenile enough to hold it?”

Now he can’t say that he did not even think to ask before he did as she requested.

“I’ll take what I need,” Fran says, “Not a drop more. You know this.”

He does know, damn it all. He can’t even properly object, not with how wan both of his travelling companions are - Fran with magick fatigue, Vaan with dire head trauma.

“One of us will need the strength to fight,” he reminds her.

“And so I shall be able,” Fran says, “With your borrowed magicks, if needs must. Hush.”

Balthier hushes.

He trails a quiet Libra down into Vaan, weaving around Fran’s spellwork, and sits back to absorb the information. The head wound _is_ healing under Fran’s direction; the small, delicate work first, draining off the excess pressure, as new bone slowly creeps to replace the missing section. Even the bruising about the churl’s eyes has begun to fade into the yellows and pale purples of healing flesh.

He watches as another wave of magicks causes a slow drip of sticky fluid out of Vaan’s nostril. It dribbles from Vaan’s cheek to his own wrist; his gorge rises abruptly and without permission.

“Do not sick on him,” Fran warns. “He may drown in it.”

Balthier swallows harshly and coughs. “You’ve a way with words today,” he mutters. He pointedly smears the fluid back onto Vaan’s skin.

Fran does not scold him for it, so he continues to watch through lidded eyes as Vaan’s body slowly, slowly heals.

When they arrive, they are pulled less than kindly from their broiling transport and dragged through reeking tunnels. Vaan remains limp in his guard’s hold. Fran, Balthier notes, is perilously close to attacking their guards over the churl’s treatment.

Vaan is deposited onto his face not far from what is either an exceptionally slow breathing Bangaa, or a very fresh corpse. Balthier hopes for the former but is suspicious it is actually the latter.

“Water,” their guard grunts, and tosses a waterskin into the dust at their feet. “Rations are every morning at roll call. If you’re late, you get nothing.” He turns on his heel in that particular Archadian way that set never fails to set Balthier’s teeth on edge and manages to stomp loudly out of the room despite the abundance of sand.

“Charming,” Balthier says. He doesn’t scramble to recover the waterskin. Either its contents have already leaked onto the ground or they have not. No need to hurry to grasp it either way.

He straightens the too short cuffs of his prison raiment and tilts his head at Fran. “Do you suppose they did any work at all before they arbitrarily declared it a dungeon?” he asks.

The body in their cell is most definitely expired.

Someone screams; the cry echoes across stone and Fran’s ears twitch in agitation. “A torture chamber, it seems,” she says. “Little else.”

“Ah, but did they add it, or was there already a facility when they walled it off?” He bends to check Vaan. There is blood adhering to the whelp’s hair and they’ve no water to spare for cleaning. He worries the hair between his fingers instead, flaking dried blood from the strands with friction.

“Don’t fuss,” Fran says, crouching over the churl as well. “He’s unlike to note the blood among the other detritus of our night.” She draws her hand through his hair, magicks stirring sluggishly at her touch. The spell is wobbling with a marked lack of mist, but it is all they have here and it will have to do. She adjusts his head into a more comfortable position. “He will be fine. Humes are a hardy breed.”

“And this one is more hard-headed than most.” Balthier checks the pulse anyway.

It is steady beneath his touch. Fran pinches the top of his hand with her claws and clucks quietly. “You worry overmuch,” she says, as though she had not just spent hours delicately putting Vaan’s skull back together.

Balthier rises and dusts off his knees. “I worry the correct amount,” he says. He claims the waterskin from the ground, pleased to see that it is watertight and its contents slosh invitingly in his hand.

He graciously offers the first drink to Fran, who declines with an annoyed flick of one long ear. Balthier drinks as he contemplates Vaan and the unmerciful headache he is sure to wake with soon.

Could he trickle water down the boy’s throat? Best not to risk it.

Fran uses a handful of sand to scrub the semi-dried clear fluid from Vaan’s face. She pinches at Vaan’s mouth and sweeps a finger through it; Balthier is about to question her when she scoops a great glob of congealed blood from the back of his throat and flicks it to the ground.

Ah, there is his gorge again, right on cue.

“Must you?” he queries.

“You would have fretted if I did not check his airway,” she says airily.

“I would have done no such thing.”

“Hmm,” Fran says and prods at the back of the Vaan’s head. Nothing shifts obviously beneath her touch; her ears cant into a pleased slope and she smiles, just barely.

The churl must be healing well, for Fran takes her leave of them less than an hour later.

“I go to scout,” says Fran. “He is resting, nothing more. You may continue fussing while you rest as well.”

Balthier raises a brow. “While you leave us here, unattended? Come now, Fran. _You_ would fret if we were both to sleep.”

“I did not say ‘sleep,’” Fran says. “I said ‘rest,’ which you may do with your eyes open, the better to keep true watch.”

By mutual decision, they leave Vaan lying next to their new corpse friend.

He watches her leave. It does, admittedly, lose something when she is not in her usual garb. The look Fran throws over her shoulder promises dire consequences if he mentions it.

Balthier reclines against a pillar to monitor the slow rise and fall of the churl’s back beneath his ill-fitting prison garb. The last of the bruising is rapidly fading from his face, though he still looks wan and pained.

A fine mess they’ve gotten themselves into, all for want of Dalmascan treasure they hadn’t even properly stolen before it was seized from them in turn.

“I should have left you on the ramparts,” Balthier muses. He leans back and closes his eyes; the night has been overlong and the morning has dragged unmercifully as well. “You would have ended up in the same place, and with much less fuss.”

He can’t even lay the blame for it at another’s feet. He wouldn’t be much of a leading man if he’d left a wide-eyed teenager to be slaughtered by over-eager Imperial simpletons.

The churl groans quietly.

Balthier opens his eyes to find Vaan stirring.

“You’re awake,” he says, and hopes for the best.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Look. Look. I know you don’t have access to Syphon until way later in the game. I know. But story segregation has to happen at some point and I categorically r e f u s e to believe that Fran, a viera specializing in long ranged archery and magicks, a viera who has been wandering Ivalice for 50 years, only knows low level white and black magicks.


	2. i'm still in awe of you

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Look, those cutscenes were cute and all, but how much more hilarious would this have been?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have a lot of feelings about Nalbina Dungeon.

Vaan walks away from him.

He has the utmost confidence in Fran’s skills as a mage, and yet Balthier is quietly relieved that Vaan has retained the use of all limbs.

The skull is a bafflingly delicate place, even amongst the most thick-headed. One blow and you could shatter bone, or contuse delicate tissue such that a person woke dead hours later. An ill ending indeed, especially to one Balthier has promised to return safely.

He utilizes his unforseen solitude to rest his eyes for a moment longer.

“Hey!” an unfortunate says. Balthier tilts his head without opening his eyes. Best not to encourage the rabble. “Hey, you came in with the kid, right? Rabanastran, blond, young?”

His stomach sinks rapidly into his detestable prison footgear. “A rather provoking mien?” he asks, and opens his eyes.

The man’s face creases. “Wouldn’t say that,” he mutters. “He was sweet. Shoulda seen his face when he saw the corpse room. Doesn’t belong down here, but most’a us don’t.”

Yes, unfortunately that does sound like Vaan. Damn it all. “I assume he’s done something to make life more difficult?”

“He got in the way when Dequza was killin’ some lizard. He’s gonna get his head smashed in.”

Balthier’s known the churl for less than a full day.

He is deeply unsurprised that Vaan’s been out of his sight for mere moments and has already managed to find the biggest nuisance in the dungeon.

The nosy prisoner points him out of the stockade. He heads towards the ostentatious arena pit and, of course, there is Vaan, somehow even dirtier than when Balthier originally found him, hair sticking straight up in the back like a bewildered chocobo.

When he leaps down, he makes sure to place himself between the churl and the trio of seeqs.  
“You all right, Vaan?” he asks.

“Yeah,” Vaan says, and then takes the initiative by scrambling after the biggest of them.

Truthfully, he’s pleasantly relieved that Vaan knows his way around an unarmed battle. He’s a good partner too, quick to duck in to apply his knuckles to unprotected ribs and even quicker to get out of the way of Balthier’s own fists.

It’s only a moment until the seeqs are squealing away from them, tumbling over themselves in an effort to beat each other to the far side of the arena.

Vaan wipes blood from his cheek with grimy fingers. “Not so tough now,” he says.

Balthier sneers at their backs.

Clearly, they’ve managed to anger some useless god or another, because Ba'gamnan’s long snout becomes involved in this fiasco. Balthier feels his face twitch; he aught to be used to the ways his fortunes shake out.

At least Fran is back from her wanderings, and with a way out secured.

Vaan manages to smear sand into his open wound whilst crawling under the gate. He fusses at it as soon as he’s upright, nails scraping through blood and dirt alike.

It’s repugnant. Balthier is fresh out of handkerchiefs to lend.

Fran’s eyes catch on Vaan’s face and narrow dangerously. “Who has injured you?” she demands.

Vaan blinks hard, still scrubbing at his face. “Huh?”

The abrasion on Vaan’s cheek _galls_ Balthier. He can only imagine how offensive Fran must find it after all her delicate work. He watches out of the corner of his eye as she runs a displeased glance down Vaan’s frame.

“You’re bruised,” she says, “You were not, when I left you.”

“That seeq,” Vaan says, “Um, Daguza? Something like that. He killed a guy and then came at me.”

“I found him in the arena,” Balthier says and finds himself wilting under Fran’s gimlet glare a bare moment later. Really, he wasn’t the churl’s keeper. And he _had_ come to Vaan’s rescue as soon as he reasonably could.

“Stay still,” says Fran. She traces her claws down Vaan’s face and the abrasion obediently lightens beneath her touch, though there isn’t enough mist about to completely rid him of the mark. Her face darkens further.

“Thanks,” Vaan says. He swipes his face again before rubbing his hand against his thigh. It leaves everything coated in a faint patina of gore.

“I am contused as well,” Balthier points out.

Fran’s nose twitches. “Then you should have kept better watch,” she says.

Unbelievable.

Balthier slants her a sideways look and thinks of protesting again. He swallows it after a moment.

He would like to criticize her proclivity for adopting wayward humes but he has benefited mightily from it and he can, at times, recognize his own hypocrisy.

They follow the judge.  


* * *

It takes a moment to sort their gear from the rest of the stolen items - his pieces of jewelry, especially, are hard to locate, though they do manage to unearth them in a small chest at last. Vaan hovers obnoxiously behind him and darts a hand into the mess of trinkets before Balthier can do more than take a cursory gander.

Balthier has an impression of blue and silver in the boy’s nimble fingers and then Vaan is out of his personal space again.

Finding his own rings, bracelets, and earrings is a bothersome endeavor that takes far longer than it aught due to the ridiculous lack of organization. He sorts through layers of inexpensive glass baubles and counterfeit metal pieces, grimacing. Base trinkets have no business sharing space with his electrum and mythril jewelry.

He inserts his errant earrings as he finds each piece, clamping the cuffs into place as he comes across them. By the time he has found all of his missing ornaments, he can hear his companions beginning to disrobe.

Balthier expects Vaan to position himself to watch Fran. It is what he would have done as an unfortunately insipid lad in his late teens.

After that unwelcome dismissal in the arena, he’s almost eager to see her reaction. When he peers up, he already has a smirk curling on his mouth, anticipating Fran’s righteous fury.

Vaan casts a single glance at Fran as he grips at the hem of his stockade issued shirt.

It is about as disinterested as it is possible for a man to be. His gaze skips past Fran’s fetching legs, does not even scrape up to her lovely derriere, and ends at the doorway, where it fixates as he struggles out of his prison vestments.

Fran rotates an ear backwards to listen behind her even as she finishes sliding the trousers off her shapely legs. “You’re staring,” she says disapprovingly.

It takes him a moment to realize she is speaking to _him_. “Apologies,” he mutters. He does not turn his back as she is already turned away from the door and it’s his duty and his delight to defend her back where she cannot.

Vaan makes eye contact with him as he discards the shirt on the nearest crate. “What?” he asks.

Balthier gestures at Fran. “A gentleman would turn around,” he says, “To give the lady privacy.”

Vaan looks over at Fran. She peers placidly back at him as she pulls up a thigh band; Vaan visibly drops his eyes to her hands but then turns his gaze back to Balthier with nary a hesitation. “I don’t think she cares,” he says, then to Fran, “Do you want me to turn around?”

“You are not ogling,” she says, “It bothers me not.”

“Okay,” Vaan says with a shrug. He bends to scoop his vest from the open chest; it dangles from his fingertips as he toes out of his ugly prison flats. “You should probably start getting dressed.”

“You’ve demonstrated a propensity for gawking.” Balthier crosses his arms and deliberately keeps his gaze away from his companions’ flesh.

“Look, I use the bathing rooms all the time,” Vaan says. His voice is muffled; he appears to be digging in the chest when Balthier risks a glance his way. The vest has been discarded to slump against the base. “Penelo gets on me if I go too many days without scrubbing down. I’m sorry I stared earlier but it’s not like I haven’t seen a naked person before.”

The bathing rooms could have any manner of unsavory connotations, but Balthier is almost certain he means rooms for actual washing. There is communal bathing in Archades. It’s considered the demesne of the low-class and those too poor to own a proper washroom. Balthier has never deigned to use such a facility.

Fran is staring at him as she fastens her greaves. She tilts a deliberate ear at him; it’s a mocking micro-expression he’s learned to read over the short years of their partnership. She thinks he’s being ridiculous and she’s not above laughing at him for it.

He grimaces back at her. He can’t very well ask the churl to turn and face away from him if Fran hasn’t requested the same.

“Impropriety on top of incarceration,” Balthier says bitterly. His fingers, recently re-acquainted with his jewelry, flirt with the sleeves of his shirt.

“She’s getting dressed,” Vaan says. His head tilts. “Why’s that so interesting?”

Balthier blinks.

Fran tsks. “The viera, too, do not find it enthralling.” She trades her all-encompassing top for her usual bare scrap of leather and metal, arms above her head as she shimmies her way into the garment. 

Balthier’s face heats unpleasantly. “Well,” he says loudly, “As long as you don’t gawp.”

“Okay,” Vaan says again.

He tugs his ridiculous vest on, shrugging his shoulders a few times to settle it appropriately. Balthier’s eyes flick downwards then away. He finds it absurd that the churl looks more exposed half wearing his clothes than he had shirtless.

Fran is gingerly threading her ears through the openings of her helm when he looks to her. “We shall depart soon,” she warns, “And you will remain in prison dress indefinitely.”

Damn it all.

He rips out of the prison shirt as soon as he finds his nerve and ends up holding it, ridiculously, before his chest, as though he is a fainting maiden desperate to preserve her modesty.

Beside him, Vaan drops his trousers without the slightest hint of hesitation and is suddenly naked from the ribs down.

Absurd to be concerned with modesty when _that_ farce is going on within feet of him. He bounces his eyes away, to Fran, and finds her laughing at him, elaborately, both ears now dipped low and wide, corner of her mouth tucked up as she adjusts her bracers.

He maintains that a proper gentleman would be best served with privacy for disrobing. Fran has never shared that sentiment and maintains that he is ludicrous for shouting when she waltzes in on him changing.

He narrows his eyes. Fran’s ears tip upright for a brief, mocking, moment.

The nerve of her.

Vaan stomps his feet into his shoes, settling his weight, somehow almost entirely dressed already while Balthier has stood squinting malevolently at Fran. He breezes past Fran to hover in the doorway.

“They’re gonna get away,” he says.

Fran joins the churl, leaving Balthier to grimace at her still mocking ears.

Privacy _finally assured_ , Balthier drops the offensive shirt and reaches for his own fine blood wool shirt.

After they quit this place, he vows, he will never set foot in Dalmasca again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fran: Hey, do you mind--stop screaming it's just me--do you mind if I adopt another Hume? 
> 
> ~~He's gonna be in for a rude awakening when she meets Penelo.~~
> 
> I will never pass up an opportunity to mock Balthier mercilessly, and, also, if you think he isn't scandalized by the rest of the groups' sartorial choices, take another long ass look at how much clothing _he_ is wearing, and how very little everyone else is.


End file.
